Top 100 Modernity's Quotes
#1. The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.
Allan Bloom
#2. [X-ray's] accidental discovery in the late 1800s fits seamlessly into modernity's fascination with, and belief in, the power of technological transparency: the desire to domesticate time (cinema), to preserve and capture the surface of the fleeting (photography), to see inside (x-ray).
Walead Beshty
#3. Entrepreneurs are favored in neoliberal contexts because they prize ingenuity, self-invention, adaptation, dispensing with establishment hierarchies, and self-mastery. Church planting can be read as a religious incarnation of late modernity's entrepreneurial disposition.
James S Bielo
#4. Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#5. There's a lot of particularly good things going on in my life at the moment. It's the fact that I get to be an ambassador for the concept of modernity. I can be creative and useful. And I don't have to grow up.
Matthew Healy
#6. I'm operating in the gap between the trajectory of modernity and the trajectory of modernism. So what people think is design is not design, it's my attempt to engage with the trajectory of modernity.
Liam Gillick
#7. When I decided to get married at 40, I couldn't find a dress with the modernity or sophistication I wanted. That's when I saw the opportunity for a wedding gown business.
Vera Wang
#8. Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let's be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#9. And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent Godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.
T. S. Eliot
#10. Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.
Bill Buford
#11. Buddhism, I think, is probably facing the single most difficult transition from one historical epoch to another, which is really the transition to modernity.
Stephen Batchelor
#13. The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#14. Modernity kills ghostly romance
("The Undying Thing")
Barry Pain
#15. Modern art has to be what is called 'intense.' it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.
G.K. Chesterton
#16. And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.
Terence McKenna
#17. The '80s was the time for the great so-called modernization in Spain. It was a moment when it seemed that everything was breaking up and moving fast into modernity.
Antonio Munoz Molina
#18. Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.
Rowan Williams
#19. The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned
Antonio Gramsci
#20. Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
Charles Baudelaire
#21. And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.
Milan Kundera
#22. Nothing is more pathological in our pathological modernity than this disease of Christian pity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#23. The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Matthew Arnold
#24. Pre-high tech, objects thunked and crashed and clopped, amid a thunder of drums, a tumult of trumpets. Today things beep and cheep and whistle. We have come from the roar of the lion to the chirp of the tree frog, ceaselessly bleating our identities while the frog-eating bats hover above us.
A.J. Orde
#25. The man who would have no imitators had legions of them, each infected with the mimetic dilemma that Rousseau personified: how to get others to notice how disinterested one is in whether they notice or not.
Paul C. Vitz
#26. Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.
Paul De Man
#27. The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
Michel Foucault
#28. Another example may be the robust revival today of traditional or pre-revolutionary beliefs, rituals, customs, ceremonies, and even superstitions, most of which were once strenuously denounced and suppressed during the nation's drive for a cosmopolitan modernity.
Xiaobing Tang
#29. And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie.
Berenice Marlohe
#30. The critics of modernity were warning that one must be vigilant against the demands of hyperorganized commercial society and consumerism lest they undermine one's true humanity.
George M. Marsden
#31. We are called to see that the Church does not adapt its thinking to the horizons that modernity prescribes for it but rather that it brings to those horizons the powerful antidote of God's truth. It is not the Word of God but rather modernity that stands in need of being demythologised.
David F. Wells
#32. It seems the more we know, the less we believe.
J.S.B. Morse
#33. We can't just stop. We're not rocks-progress, migration, motion is ... modernity. It's ANIMATE, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for ...
Tony Kushner
#34. Extravagance of desire is the fundamental cause which has led the world into its present predicament. Fast rather than slow, more rather than less - this flashy "development" is linked directly to society's impending collapse.
Masanobu Fukuoka
#35. What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.
Oriana Fallaci
#36. Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.
Dan Simmons
#38. America's vulnerability comes precisely from its strength, its wealth, its power and its modernity. It's the usual story of the dog chasing its own tail.
Oriana Fallaci
#40. Wrangling about precisely what constitutes genuine philosophy, proper philosophical practice, method, and aims is an important part of modern philosophy's content and heritage
Gregory B. Sadler
#41. Sam marvelled at how easily people walked off the street and into these decadent dioramas. It was spooky how easily people's inner landscapes were expressed in enclosed booths and glittering bars. Their private nightmares slid into the moulded furniture as if it had been designed for them.
Guy Mankowski
#42. Traditions brings continuity to one's existence, but this sort of continuity is precisely what has been increasingly lost
throughout modernity.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
#43. As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios.
Susan Vreeland
#44. The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#45. I always try to connect with what's happening in the world-reality, modernity, the 21st century, all that - and with Jil it started to feel very disconnected from the outside and how women were looking at fashion, experiencing fashion, interpreting fashion.
Raf Simons
#46. People today are dying for something to live for.
J.S.B. Morse
#47. That's modernity, if you ask me: endless division.
Lauren Oliver
#48. In India there's no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man's face and you'll find an old man's mind.
Meghna Pant
#49. Once we decided to do a tower in New York, it had to say something about our group, reflecting the mix of modernity and creativity in our organization. It's a symbol.
Bernard Arnault
#50. Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.
Robert Hughes
#51. Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state's monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#52. For members of a traditional society where many traditions have been discredited, an interest in modernity can result in a restless sophistication. Mehmet Ertegun seems not to have been a restless man.
George W. S. Trow
#53. High-consequence risks form one particular segment of the generalised 'climate of risk' characteristic of late modernity - one characterised by regular shifts in knowledge-claims as mediated by expert systems.
Anthony Giddens
#54. In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.
John Fowles
#55. It is rare in today's turbulent world to find a city that so harmoniously mixes tradition and modernity, without enslaving itself to either one.
Margie Rynn
#56. I think China's view of freedom has to do with material wealth and modernity, and the Dalai's Lama view of freedom is liberation in the Buddhist sense, which is freedom from ignorance and freedom from suffering.
Pico Iyer
#57. Hitting "like" on a social media platform is the modern day version of clapping at the end of a performance.
J.R. Rim
#58. Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#59. Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another.
Sivananda Saraswati
#61. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#62. You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition.
Theodore Bikel
#63. I'm not a guru. I wish you wouldn't pose these things at me, man. Ask me about women or something.
Charles Bukowski
#64. When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
Eric Hoffer
#65. It indicates where the problem lies for Descartes. It lies in other people.
Paul C. Vitz
#66. My interest has always been in an architecture which reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of historical references. My work deals with what is happening now - our techniques and materials, what we are capable of doing today.
Jean Nouvel
#67. You and I will never live to see the day that women recover their balance.
Zane Grey
#68. When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.
Harvey Cox
#70. It's a tragedy that modernity has released this Ebola beast into the world. It renders humans untouchable, and that's sickening. The international response so far has been scandalous. China has delivered f**k all.
Bob Geldof
#71. This is the Modern Man, who cannot save himself but wants to save the world.
He is the Wise who knows not.
And his footsteps on the road click tic-tac, tic-tac
Cristiane Serruya
#72. What we witness at the fea is not just a celebration of the multiplicity of modernities but also, and more importantly, a critical commentary on local structures of inequality that take for granted that both tradition and modernity are the prerogatives of the high ranking and wealthy.
Niko Besnier
#73. while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.
John Mark Reynolds
#74. Our federal Constitution embodies the idea of modern India: it defines not only India but also modernity.
Pranab Mukherjee
#75. The possibility of a musical modernity that was not characterized by sensationalism
Alain Frogley
#76. To be "modern" means refusing to worry about where the benefits of progress actually come from.
Sylvain Tesson
#77. [Bruno] Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antimony between nonhuman nature and human culture.
-- Randall Styers, Making Magic, p. 17
Randall Styers
#78. Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#79. No doubt Western modernity has its limitations and discontents. Still, it is far better than the known alternatives - not only, or even primarily, because of its advanced technology but because of its fundamental commitment to freedom, reason, and human dignity.
Rodney Stark
#80. Modernity consists in a revolt against the prevailing style, an unyielding rage against the official order.
Irving Howe
#81. Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
Allan Bloom
#82. The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.
Octavio Paz
#83. Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it's not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don't want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.
I.M. Pei
#84. When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always 20 years behind the times.
Mark Twain
#85. There were the usual deaths, yes, those to be expected, people who started off celebrating and ended up killing each other, uncinematic deaths, deaths from the realm of folklore, not modernity: deaths that didn't scare anybody.
Roberto Bolano
#86. I think that in France, we really admire American films, we admire their drive, we admire the modernity and ellipsism in the film and the writing and the style of acting, and we look at them perhaps in a way to see what we can steal from them, too, to make our own films more modern.
Francois Cluzet
#87. All places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.
Italo Calvino
#88. All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many.
Ulrich Beck
#89. It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life - with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#90. What we will criticize 'modern' eroticism for is its lack of genuine sensuality, a sensuality which implies beauty or charm, passion or modesty, power over the object of desire, and fulfilment.
Henri Lefebvre
#91. A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.
St. Anthony The Great
#92. North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#93. Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.
David Novak
#94. I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think?
Andrew Sullivan
#96. America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.
Jean Baudrillard
#97. Antiquity and modernity are cut from the same cloth. That is to say, our sense of things being 'ancient' is produced - both historically and in practice - by the sense that we ourselves are 'modern'.
David Wengrow
#98. The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh.
Amadeo Bordiga
#99. Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference.
Jurgen Habermas
#100. Modern anxiety is expressed in the longing for what most people fear, even as modern grief is expressed in the unconsummated mourning for what they never really had.
Joseph Roach
